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Saturday, July 17, 2010

POLL RESULTS: Best 2010 Linux Distro Release

[In a Radio host voice]

Three weeks...
430 voters...
One "Champion" Distro...

...And the award goes to... PCLinuxOS 2010!!!!!(Hey, what's not to love about a bit of staging and drama? ;-) )

PCLinuxOS 2010 obtained the most votes, almost twice as much as the next distro, Linux Mint 9. I have to say I am not all sure that first position is truly representative, though. PCLinuxOS was way behind Linux Mint and Ubuntu most of the time only to quickly overtake them in the last few days...

Hmm... Do I smell some PCLinuxOS fans around? :-)

Here are the final results:

Distro Release

Votes (%)

PCLinuxOS 2010.1

137 (31%)

Linux Mint 9

78 (18%)

Ubuntu 10.04 (and brethren)

63 (14%)

OpenSUSE 11.3

47 (10%)

Fedora 13

20 (4%)

Arch Linux 2010.05

19 (4%)

Pardus 2009.2

18 (4%)

Other

16 (3%)

Mandriva 2010.1

13 (3%)

Slackware 13.1

13 (3%)

Sabayon 5.3

4 (0%)

CentOS 5.5

2 (0%)

And the same results in a neat little graph:

I was pleased to see that most voters seem to agree with me on the quality of the 2010 releases for the most part. PCLinuxOS and Linux Mint are both in the lead, while the Ubuntu family is comfortably sitting in a well deserved third position. If you have read my review you probably know I was a bit disappointed with Ubuntu 10.04 myself, but I guess it was more about it failing to deliver according to the expectations it had raised, rather than because it was a bad release per se.

OpenSUSE 11.3 gets an impressive fourth position, a significant achievement considering it was released very late. Fedora 13 gets little support for a distro of its popularity and relevance, but I can't say I am surprised, as I wasn't particularly impressed with Goddard myself. Arch Linux does pretty well in sixth position, slightly ahead of Pardus. Particularly surprising is the low support for Mandriva, a popular distro which has had quite an important follow up. My guess is that the late changes in the company have had an impact, the most obvious being a very late release, which might have prevented people from having a taste of it.

As usual, thanks to all who voted and a big CONGRATULATIONS goes to the PCLinuxOS team for their amazing work! (Actually, congratulations to everybody behind these and all Linux distros, it is a small "miracle" what they achieve year after year!)

29 comments:

PCLinuxOS came out with quarterly releases, that is probably why the sudden surge of votes happened. PCLinuxOS 2010 is an extremely well maintained rolling release, they have earned the number one spot.

The PCLinuxOS Team did a massive amount of work to build and maintain the 2010 release, they earned this honor with all their hard work. These guys have gone above and beyond in hardware support and they build a huge number of packages that keep things up to date and running smooth.

You always know what is going on with PCLinuxOS too, information is always posted on Twitter and it is really nice! PCLinuxOS has to be the hardest working distribution out there.

Ehm 2010 is half over, so the remaining half is still unknown how it impact the experiences of diverse linux distributions and users alike.The distribution of the year kind of polls are only useful if the year is over, thus in the beginning of 2011 you should hold this poll, since we then know what happend in 2010, release wise.

no pclinux fanboys, members on the pclinux forum mention polls like this from time to time and usually invite us to vote so we voted, maybe other forums didn't had any announcement about this poll so this could explain the drastic difference on vote count because on other situations you can find 2000 or more votes from ubuntu users that has a bigger userbase and more forum members with this information available

the quarterly updates, there was a 2010.01 and then a update that had problems with video drivers so it had to be replaced with 2010.07, not exactly a quarterly update but served that purpose

@Trent Black: Are your comments aimed at me? In such case, why are you saying I am "patting myself on the back"? I think you didn't understand what I wrote?

Anyways, sorry to hear you are having issues with PCLinuxOS. I don't, and it seems neither do many others. I can only recommend you try other distros and use what best fits your needs, even if that means using other OS.

Btw, I do use Linux all day everyday as well, not sure what you meant by that?

Why assume that PCLinuxOS had to rely on "fans" to win this poll?. Is it too much to assume that they won it in merit?. How about the fact that it is a fine, top notch distro in it's own right. Would you have said that if ubuntu or mint or suse won?.

What is it about Pclinuxos users? We are always being accused of rigging votes. Somehow we are always using underhand tactics to get our wicked way!! Come on, this is getting old. When are people going to accept that the real reason Pclinuxos keeps hitting the top of polls is because :-

I find this to be a good result. I use PCLinuxOS and settled here after using others first. If I don't have installation trouble, I dont have any trouble. I didn't vote but found this poll after the fact. I wonder how many other PCLinuxOS users, like me, install the OS for non linux users and we never hear from them again? Good poll, nice to see such a simple distro do so well, did I mention how friendly the forum was?

I have trawled through dozens of distros in the last five years, looking for one that works first time and is easy to set up to what I want. My favourite for a while was Lindows but it fell well behind the others so I moved on until eventually dropping in on PCLOS 2007. After that, I hopped for a while but kept going back, through 2009 and now the 2010 KDE4 release which has me solidly hooked. It worked first time out of the box and hasn't given me any troubles that I didn't create myself. For me, it deserves to be on top of the pile at the moment. Oh, I didn't vote either. The only announcement that I found on the forum was one that pointed to this results page.Well done to the PCLOS Teams.

As a Linux Mint 9/Ubuntu user I have to say congrads to the PCLinuxOS team. Great job guys! I've tried it and I like it too. Damn nice OS, reminds me a lot of Mandriva and there's certainly nothing wrong with that.Objectively, I don't personally believe there is a "best" distro. It all depends on the user and the hardware. Anyway, whatever your distro of choice might be, viva la freedom to choose and hail open source!

as another of those non-voting PCLOS users who came to read the results, I just wish to say 'thank you'.You show an attitude to Linux (distros) that I wish I saw more of generally.I am pleaased for PCLOS but we should not forget there are many fine distros out there and all deserve their time in the spotlight.To those who queried the quarterly release .... 2010.07 was the second one, with a new naming scheme, reflecting the month rather than the quarter. Congrats to the PCLOS dev crew..

Ever take a stock Harley and customize it so that it's 'just right'? Lovingly balancing the engine, carb and pipes to get the best out of the machine. Paying attention to the smallest details so that at the switch of a button this task, or that task, gets done with the smallest amount of effort making the ride so much smoother. That's kind of what Texstar did with Mandriva when he built PCLOS. The thing is, we all get to take it for a ride. :)

One main reason why this blog is useless to "U" fanboys becoz their distro isn't number one. You know what? I really hate to see to many Ubuntu respin out there. Ubuntu never fix any f***** bugs in their release, leave the matter to the hardcore fanboys and elitist (sounds like windows apologizer to me).

Anyway if you can't accept it, you always have your beloved distrowatch, which always pays attention to your new release and respin.

I use PCLinuxOS and JuLinux (justuselinux.com) the only working Ubuntu respin beside Mint (and I'm a moslem). Powered by Jesus Christ, cool. Jesus is also moslem prophet. But really, if I have to choose between Ubuntu and it's derivates, I prefer JuLinux. And I haven't vote either.